Digital scanner devices are ubiquitously used in residential as well as commercial environments. Digital scanners are used either as standalone devices or integrated within multi-function devices (MFD) in which the functions of a copier, printer, scanner and/or facsimile are combined in a unified machine. Operationally, multiple-page hard-copy documents are manually or automatically fed into digital scanners or MFDS, referred to generally as scanners, resulting in multiple scanned image files corresponding to the hard-copy pages. In a scan-to-email function, the scanners generate multiple scan image files, output an electronic message, attach each of those separate scan image files to the electronic message, and email the message, with the image files, to the intended recipient(s) over a private or public network, such as the Internet.
However, scan-to-email scanner systems are typically constrained in that the recipient receives multiple, separate scanned image file attachments corresponding to one or more scan jobs, where each scan job could comprise more than one hard page. This requires the recipient to figure out which scanned image file attachment belongs to which scan job and manage multiple attachments, which may be very cumbersome.
Accordingly, there is need for more network bandwidth, processing power efficient, and user-friendly scan-to-email methods that enable multiple scanned image files (corresponding to multiple-page hard-copy documents) to be encoded and packaged into a compressed unitary file and sent as an email attachment to intended recipient(s).